Paradoxical Horizons

“So I went to tea with Roland Haye on the following Sunday. He arrived to call for me, and we walked, in embarrassed silence, along misty muddy Essex lanes and along by the wooden fence of the Claybury asylum, through a bluebell wood, and so back into suburbia and privet hedges to the Hayes’ house; 210 Cranbrook Road; a house in the ‘better’, and older, part of Ilford, a house with some rudiments of refinement, and a maid in cap and apron to open the front door.”

Kathleen Raine, Farewell Happy Fields

In the film 'The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger' there’s a scene in which Tilda Swinton is making a dessert with apples (a crumble?–although it looks more like cobbler, or perhaps Eve’s pudding); as Swinton peels and cuts numerous apples, Berger begins to talk to Swinton about his father, and how he would cut an apple: Tilda Swinton changes how she has been cutting the apples, and begins to cut them in the way Berger describes as he talks. Somehow this distills a number of things that the film (or four films–one for each season) is about: a connection with the land, with the seasons (of course), repetition, reenactment, cycles, memory and time.

Having not contributed anything for this blog for many months, having a film shot on film being shown abroad for the first time has prompted me to write. 'Orchard/Asylum', a nine-minute black and white 16mm film, is being shown at the Sluice Film Festival in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland–at the time of writing–today. As the film is debuting there, I am not currently showing it online at the moment (in an ideal world, I would be there with a 16mm exhibition print, but it will be shown digitally). I have eschewed a voiceover for the film, which could explain it to the viewer as it unfolds, but if it could be reduced to a linguistic utterance, it wouldn’t need to be a film. However, its coming together in fits and starts, out of the pandemic, has echoes with other things I’ve written about recently, like the retracing of the M11 Link Road photographs, and, as such, I naturally had the desire to place the film.

Around the time I first shot some 16mm film, in the autumn of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I had been making sure that I took advantage of the permitted exercise by making regular cycle rides that explored ever-wider circles around north-east London where I live. This was an opportunity to find places that I might otherwise have overlooked, or never have had a reason to be, to find different routes through the suburbs, particularly where it begins to peter out, to lose its density, along the Lea Valley, the Ching Brook, places like Larkswood, the Roding Valley Park, Aldborough Hatch. From some of these places one can see an ornate tower on a hill, a landmark on this particular edge of London. When I was at school, in the room that I studied maths for a few years, I could see this tower from the window, and I drew it on my maths folder sometime in the Autumn of 1990. We all knew its reputation, perhaps mistakenly so: this tower marked the Claybury Hospital, once the Claybury Mental Hospital, originally the Claybury Lunatic Asylum.

“Today these great 'museums of the mad', once such a familiar sight on the outskirts of cities and towns across the UK, have either vanished or metamorphosed into business parks, leisure centres or - as in the case of Friern - up-market housing developments. Their former residents are back with their families, or living in group homes or social housing; or they have vanished into the netherworld of the urban homeless.”

Barbara Taylor, ‘The Demise of the Asylum in late Twentieth-Century Britain: A personal History’

When I was growing up in those suburbs, there weren’t that many tall buildings around. There were a couple at Gants Hill, such as Wentworth House; other points of orientation would have been the narrow spire on the church on the Drive or a tall towerblock by the Green Man roundabout, demolished years ago; there was a day walking to school I realised I could see One Canada Square at Canary Wharf through a gap between houses towards Wanstead Park. The tower of Claybury Hospital was a fulcrum, one of the highest points for miles around, looming over a bend in the M11 coming into London, often blue-grey in the distance (it shows up in one of the views in the M11 Link Road photographs taken in 1994/2014, the last picture at the end of the post ‘SQUIBB’). Subsequently, in recent years, quite a few tall buildings have sprung up around central Ilford, diluting the impact these points once made.

In the second year of the pandemic, I cycled to Claybury for the first time. It was one of those places that one might otherwise have needed a reason to go to, certainly while it still operated as a hospital; Claybury finally closed in 1997, the era of ‘care in the community’. It appears as the phonetic ‘Clayberry’ in Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room, the misspelling a quote from a letter (David Rodinsky’s sister was a patient there). Rodinsky’s Room was published in 1999, the year I moved back to London after my degree; I had read Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory the year before, which was both part of but also a spur to the psychogeography which was then becoming prevalent and had visited the Princelet Street Synagogue that year during London Open House, which features in both books, being built behind the house where David Rodinisky lived. The publication of Rodinsky’s Room was accompanied by various events (I went to a talk by the authors at Toynbee Hall) and a couple of small chap-book-like publications:  Rachel Lichtenstein's Rodinsky's Whitechapel and Iain Sinclair’s Dark Lanthorns, both of which had walks that the reader could follow (the primary means of becoming a psychogeographer). Dark Lanthorns took the form of a series of walks Sinclair had made following lines traced in pen in David Rodinsky’s copy of the London A to Z, reproduced so that the reader could follow them. One of these was a route from South Woodford station to Claybury. In Sinclair’s narrative, he reaches the end of the walk to be met by the scene of Claybury Hospital being converted into the gated community it is today.

“As a tangible commodity, Dark Lanthorns asserts a powerful aura; it both palpably recalls those other A-Zs that the reader is presumed to have handled and evokes the unique singularity of a hallowed holy relic. This strange doubling makes the book’s facsimile maps feel like something of a challenge. Rodinsky’s drawings are generally more complex than the linear routes documented within Sinclair’s essays. It is hard, therefore, not to scrutinise his marks for some deeper significance, plotting out alternative routes that Sinclair might have taken, or which, by haptic invitation, one might now go out and walk oneself.”

Richard Hornsey,‘The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas’

I didn’t do any of these walks at the time. Possibly I felt that I was familiar with the walk traced around Whitechapel by Lichtenstein in Rodinsky's Whitechapel (and I had recently done Janet Cardiff’s 'The Missing Voice (Case Study B)', both Artangel commissions, contemporary to the publication of Rodinsky’s Room). I had also spent a year at college there five years earlier, then happened to be living with someone selling clothes at Spitalfields market on Sundays, so I naturally spent a lot of time in the area; the walks in Dark Lanthorns I think I possibly felt could be experienced sufficiently through the text and perhaps the walk from South Woodford to Claybury felt close to home or old ground–but ultimately, looking back twenty-six years, I’m unclear why I didn’t walk these. I finally followed the walk to Claybury in the spring of 2023.

Setting out by bicycle without a smartphone, once one begins to get close, the tower of Claybury is frequently hidden as the hill it sits so prominently on rises up around it. The route I took there the first time was not entirely unfamiliar, on the edge of my world growing up, with some friends in Snaresbrook, South Woodford, Hermon Hill, with the occasional school event in some odd venue around there. It was the last weekend of summer before the start of term, the rhythms of the academic year still dictating my seasons, with concurrent teaching and studying part-time. The initial spur to go there was nothing to do with Kathleen Raine or David Rodinsky: I wanted to investigate the community orchard there; the hospital’s grounds are now open to the public as Claybury Park which include the orchard. The oldest apple trees are believed to have been planted in the 1920s, possibly by the inmates themselves as part of what was then seen as the hospital’s progressive therapeutic regime; on the marked page from Rodinsky’s A to Z reproduced in Dark Lanthorns this area has the legend ‘Asylum Farm’. After years of neglect, most of the orchard has been restituted by The Orchard Project (some of the veteran apple trees are still surrounded by impenetrable undergrowth); the brief passage from Farewell Happy Fields that mentions the fence around the asylum was a felicitous coincidence. I arrived to discover signs prohibiting picking (it was no doubt far too early for almost every variety of apple , needing a couple more weeks to ripen then at least); my interest in the community orchard was as a result of wanting to discover where I could forage apples in the wider local area, something that had grown out of my cycle rides from early in the pandemic. With heavy overcast August weather, I took a few underexposed photographs as a record then.

Reading Lights Out for the Territory and Rodinsky’s Room at the time of moving back to London at the end of the 1990s (as well as Peter Ackroyd, Clarence Rook, Blanchard Jerrold, Emmanuel Litvinoff, George Gissing, among others) was almost a conscious project of building a particular world in which the present, contemporary everyday was overlaid with a mythology of a certain vision of London. I have written before about my first real contact with the city of Paris early in in my degree, already-mythologised in comparison to my growing up in the suburbs (see ‘A Fragmentary Snapshot’). Kathleen Raine declared that there was ‘no poetry in Ilford’, seeing it as the epitome of lower middle class philistinism a hundred years ago; making art as a student in the 1990s I think I had an unspoken feeling as though nothing good came of the suburbs–very much a young artist’s cry–echoing Raine: ‘things’ happened elsewhere. Had I known about, or read Farewell, Happy Fields perhaps I might have felt differently about my suburban upbringing then; Raine went to the same infant school as I did, when it was new (she was born the year after it had been built), while it still looked out onto scrubland to the north where the march of bricks and mortar stopped for a time: coincidentally, Raine even mentions the road on which we lived by name. I felt there was a lack of mythology: there were hardly any buildings in Ilford older than a hundred years when I was growing up then, which I think contributed. There were intimations of course, bits of buried history, most of which had left very little trace, nothing to really grasp onto. London was something that happened after one got on the tube: Ilford had no distinct character of its own (or at least that was how it seemed to me then), apart from its paradoxical London/not-London identity, becoming part of Greater London with the formation of the London Borough of Redbridge in 1965 but retaining an Essex postcode. (I only really felt like I came from London when I went away to do my degree, being made to feel so). During my PhD, and particularly during the pandemic, I began to make work about where I was now, and making work about where I grew up in some form: photographs of cinemas or sites of cinemas where I would once have watched films (Gants Hill), traces of cattlegrids in South Woodford, a still unfinished film around Newbury Park, a project retracing the photographs I took along the destruction of the M11 Link Road, revisiting sketchbooks from what was twenty-five and then thirty years ago, rebuilding a world that had formed me (art school had made me disavow that particular way of working–simply drawing by observation from the motif–which I internalised, then, after my education, it became something located in the past, demonstrating a lack of sophistication in my thinking in my teenage years about what an artwork was or could be–despite having a father who was an artist, being brought up with art around me, I still had a narrow view of art to accompany my narrow horizons of the suburbs: I would have agreed with Raine then; as much as the particularity of Farewell Happy Fields makes it valuable, I don’t think I would like Raine as a person if I met her now).

After my first visit to Claybury, I thought I would to like to go back to film there, and planned to do so soon. At this point I had been thinking that it was a hundred years since the walk described in Farewell Happy Fields, and this seemed like enough of an excuse to expose some 16mm film (I had no thought then of making a it a record of this location through the seasons). However, leaving work during the first week back, the handlebars on my bicycle inexplicably snapped, and taking it to a local shop, there were a number of other issues which needed addressing, with the result that was simply not economical to repair. I had to wait for my first full month’s pay of the academic year before I could get a replacement. I finally returned with a new bicycle in October, carrying my Ciné Kodak BB Junior and fifty feet of Ilford film; the signs from my first visit were gone, and very few apples remained. I picked up a windfall cooker only. (This appears in the 16mm 'Three Colour Process' film in the post on the Ciné Kodak Model K.) Nothing quite cohered as neatly as I would have liked: perhaps I had retraced Kathleen Raine’s steps one hundred years on; the orchard is believed to have been planted in the 1920s, although this is not certain; the 16mm format was created by Kodak a couple of years later; the camera I was using came onto the market at the end of the 1920s; the Ilford film stock I was using, made in Ilford itself, dated to the 1960s. This first attempt at a film was not enough on its own: I had bought enough of this long-discontinued Ilford stock to film four seasons, and there was thus a certain logic in doing so.

Over the next two years I went back at intervals to film during winter, spring and summer to make a portrait of a place. Each section of film was edited in camera, with the exception of autumn, where there were a couple of false starts from forgetting to make sure the camera’s motor was fully wound (autumn being still relatively early in my use of a spring motor camera); the spring section I cut short at a shot of clouds in the sky: there were a few shots after this but it seemed to lend itself to the transition to summer. The shots weren’t planned as a result, but the general movement in each section is from details to wider views, with autumn, filmed first, showing a panning of London on the far horizon, travelling out of the park, and along the road that Kathleen Raine and Roland Haye might have walked along, where the boundary of the hospital’s grounds once, with a look back at the tower disappearing into the bleached-out light leak at the end of the roll (I did remove the film from the camera in a dark bag, so this should not have been affected by light; however before developing, I stored this in a film can before that was clearly not light tight–developing the roll in two halves, there’s the same light leak near the middle of the autumn section where the film was cut to fit in my developing tank which only takes 33 not 50 feet).

The stock, Ilford Fast Pan Film, came in cans with ‘date of test’ printed on the labels with dates of January and September. The reason for using this film was that it was double-perforated, so I could use it in the Ciné-Kodak BB Junior, I’d acquired it cheaply and the fact that it was branded Ilford did seem to fit; I kept the full overscan so that the name Ilford would periodically appear in the rebate, as well as emphasising the materiality of the film, although this can be a bit too seductive. Despite being well over fifty years old, I exposed the film at an exposure index of 80 and, with no information to go on other than a hunch from having used Ilford Mark V film in the past, I developed it as if it was FP4 Plus. Some of the spring and summer shots used a couple of different strength yellow filters too, highlighting dried grass and deepening skies just a little too. I neglected to keep records but I think most of the film was developed in HC110, possibly with a section in Ilfotec DDX. For titles I took sections directly from Farewell Happy Fields, in the text of which each season is mentioned at least once, and some seasons many times. The words orchard and asylum also appear, and were used for a title. I experimented with a couple of different ways of making the titles: I enlarged passages with a photocopier and filmed them taped to a wall, an played around with different overlays, but it all got a bit arch; the titles in the film were copied from the book, then filmed with the Kodak Ciné Titler, a vintage device made for just that purpose. The title roll does appear to be slipping in the gate, leading to a slight blurring, but I accepted that as a contingent effect in trying to make it all in camera. Finally, I added sound. The first section, winter seemed to fit no sound at all, so I left it silent. Spring is accompanied by sound recorded in the orchard at Claybury at the same time of year, but not at the time of filming; summer does have sound recorded concurrently with filming, although I frequently left the recording device in the same place as I filmed a few different shots around it, which is why the sound of the camera running varies in intensity. For autumn, filmed first, without sound, I thought I would overlay it with the sound of the camera running on its own; there seemed to be a logic to the sound progressing in this way for each section. Retrospectively, possibly I would have been more rigorous in how it was put together, the sound and visuals, choosing the shots and shot length more judiciously, with the idea from the outset that it would be a portrait of a place through the seasons, but the impressionistic qualities that its making effected feel apt.

References
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 'The Missing Voice (Case Study B)', https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/the-missing-voice-case-study-b/
D. Fulton, 'Heaven of hell: Representations of Ilford in the writings of Denise Levertov and Kathleen Raine', 2010
'Repton Park formerly Claybury Hospital', Historic Hospitals: https://historic-hospitals.com/2015/06/21/repton-park-formerly-claybury-hospital/
Richard Hornsey, ‘The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas’, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2016, pp. 265-280
Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room, Granta Books, London 1999
Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Whitechapel, Artangel, London 1999 https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/rodinskys-whitechapel/
Kathleen Raine, Farewell Happy Fields, Hamish Hamilton, London 1973
Iain Sinclair, Dark Lanthorns, Goldmark Uppingham, Rutland 1999
Iain Sinclair, London Orbital, Granta Books, London 2002
Tilda Swinton, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, 'The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger' https://seasonsinquincy.com/
Barbara Taylor, ‘The Demise of the Asylum in late Twentieth-Century Britain: A personal History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2011, Sixth Series, Vol. 21, pp. 193-215
The Orchard Project:
https://www.theorchardproject.org.uk/blog/claybury-orchard-a-sanctuary-for-wildlife-and-the-mind/

HELP SAVE CLAREMONT ROAD

Corner of Grove Green Road and Claremont Road, 2nd August 1994

A year ago, I made a post titled Retracings which was the first of a short series revisiting photographs I had taken in 1993 and 1994 along the route of what was then called the M11 Link Road, now the A12, with photographs taken twenty years later, in 2013 and 2014, on the same dates showing the same viewpoints, or as close to the original viewpoints as was possible to recreate. There was one final set of photographs which I did not revisit in 2014 (or at least I have no memory of so doing and have not come across any negatives of this); earlier this year however, I did revisit these photographs, taken on the 2nd of August 1994, attempting to recreate them thirty years on. I didn't develop these new photographs at the time however, and have only scanned them recently. A new post on this set of images–from 1994 and 2024–a year on from my first post about the M11 Link Road to end the series seemed fitting.

A reason I may not have revisited this particular set of photographs in 2014 when I had done so for the others is that most of these pictures were taken on Claremont Road itself, which was almost completely wiped away by the building of the road–and there were only nine photographs from 1994. This was due to running out of film: I had been taking photographs around Wapping, Rotherhithe, and Greenwich earlier in the day, was on my second and last roll of film I had with me, and only got out at Leyton station, interrupting my journey home, in order to use the last few frames. I hadn't taken any photographs of the destruction along the route of the M11 Link Road since March that year: the camera I had been using, a Praktica BC1 (my first 35mm SLR and my first 'proper' camera) had jammed shortly after the last roll of film taken in March, and was uneconomical to fix. I didn't buy a new camera until the summer, finding a secondhand Praktica BCA body to replace the BC1 and keeping the original f1.8 50mm lens.

Grove Green Road, 2nd August 2024

Emerging from Leyton station that day, it was immediately clear that something was happening. Most of the photographs taken earlier that year are eerily devoid of people, partly as many were taken on Dyers Hall Road and Colville Road; the focus of the protests was Claremont Road–of which I had taken a number of photographs, but saw almost no one in all the times I was taking pictures–perhaps the protest activity only really began to make itself felt later in the year. Immediately I'd left the station I passed a number of police vans and ambulances, and then coaches with scores of police. Walking from Leyton station along Grove Green Road, the junction of the southern end of Claremont Road was blocked by police; I walked along Grove Green Road to the other end of Claremont Road, which was still open. The first photograph at the head of this post was taken at this corner, blocked with broken furniture, with a BBC news Land Rover parked alongside (there was a segment on the news on television that night, but filmed from before I arrived; I found this clip on YouTube filmed that day–about 11 minutes in–although the footage appears earlier in the afternoon). The second photograph is taken looking over where some houses had been demolished on Grove Green Road–the elevated position was taken from the Cathall Road bridge over the railway. The bridge is now wider and longer, but the picture from this August is pretty much from the same position. I did wonder if any of the trees could be the same, but I think all the trees in the photograph from 1994 are on the verge of Claremont Road which faced the Central Line (there were terraced houses on one side of Claremont Road only).

I must have then taken the next photograph after descending the ramp of the bridge, to Grove Green Road, looking across its junction with the northern end of Claremont Road. In the contemporary photograph below, there is the gable end of one of the new houses squeezed into the space remaining after the road was built. Five houses were demolished on this corner of Grove Green Road, then two new ones built into the site, which makes me think that the angle of the contemporary photograph is wrong–probably the grit bin to the left should probably be at the right edge of the view–the widening of both the bridge and the turning off Grove Green Road onto it are deceptive as to where this exact spot was in 1994. The angle of the photograph from 2024 does however include one of the transmitters from Graeme Miller's 'Linked' on the lamp post, upper right.

The rest of the photographs from the 2nd of August were taken on Claremont Road itself, now almost completely disappeared but for a small stub that remains at what was its southern end–Claremont Road was originally a loop, joining Grove Green Road at both ends–with some new houses built into the tight space behind the A12, so that Claremont Road, E11 still exists as an address. The photographs from 1994 were on Ilford Delta 400 film, which I had developed at Boots in Ilford: that summer, after leaving art college and no longer having access to develop black and white film myself (unlike the previous black and white photographs of the M11 Link Road, made while I was still at college), I mostly used Ilford XP2. In my second post on Ilford XP2 from 2018, a number of the photographs illustrating it were taken earlier the same day as the last M11 Link Road pictures here; the benefit of using XP2 of course was that it could be processed as C41, being cheaper and quicker when using a high street lab. I think I may have had the roll of Delta 400 as part of an offer, '3 rolls of film for the price of 2' or something like. XP2 has a very long tonal scale when developed as C41; the negatives on Ilford Delta 400 have very little shadow detail in comparison. I did not compensate in exposure when taking the photographs: the conditions that afternoon were overcast but quite bright–under the trees along Claremont Road, with the almost featureless sky in the centre of the viewfinder, made for some rather dark photographs. To attempt an approximation of the same angle and viewpoint of the images from 1994 below, I used a long lens–a Canon 135mm f3.5–from the Cathall Road bridge, looking along the A12 where once I had been facing down the length of Claremont Road.

There are a couple of photographs taken in 1994 on Claremont Road which look up to a platform across two of the houses, where there are protestors and photographers; trying to replicate the precise viewpoint, if it was possible, would now result in empty frames of sky. However, I did attempt to take photographs which at least looked in the same direction. These I took with the 135mm lens from the Roman Catholic Cemetery, pointing my camera across the Central Line and the A12 beyond towards the backs of houses on Grove Green Road. The roofs of the houses that the protestors and photographers are balanced on would have backed onto these. Here, I was limited in the exact viewpoint thanks to there being a screen of trees along the higher plots in that corner of the cemetery, so could only take photographs were there were gaps. The taller building behind with the twin gable ends in the pictures from 2024 is the three-storey Northcote Arms pub. Looking at contemporary maps from before the road, quite possibly I should have been taking photographs a little to the right of this–but the trees prevented me from accessing a more accurate viewpoint. (Two photographs from 2024, taken with a 50mm lens, show more of the context, and the position of the new houses on what remains of Claremont Road).

What appears to have happened earlier on the 2nd of August 1994 was the dismantling of a wooden tower on the roof of one or more houses further down Claremont Road, with protestors 'locked-on' in anticipation to frustrate or delay the planned demolitions. By the time I had arrived to take my handful of pictures, the action was essentially over, although I may just have caught the last of these protestors being removed by the cherry pickers before the houses at the end of the street could be safely demolished, although it's hard to see what is actually going on in the detail of these photographs from the distance I found myself. In 1994 I certainly could have used a longer lens, but at the time I had only the 50mm Prakticar lens from my original BC1–it would be nearly another year before I got a different focal length lens, a 28mm, buying a 80-200 zoom some time after. 

The image below is as close as I got to the line of police blocking the road, notably not all in riot gear, some in shirt-sleeves on that August day, providing space behind for the cherry pickers to do their work. Although I had sympathies in that direction, it's clear I was never really going to make a photojournalist: when I realised what I had walked into, I could have dashed to the high street in Leyton and bought another roll of film from somewhere, I could have found a better vantage point to take photographs, among those on the roofs. I didn't interact with any of the protestors: the previous photographs I'd taken on earlier occasions were an aesthetic project, devoid of people, which was what the first photographs were made for, although this was rather arbitrary to fit into a theme. Simultaneously, I realised I was creating a record of sorts, if entirely unsystematic and partial. Looking back, I wished I'd taken more photographs of course, as I've previously written.

It was serendipity that I happened to have nine frames remaining on the roll of film in my camera on that day, and that I made the decision to get off the Central Line train when I did–coming back from Greenwich on the Docklands Light Railway, I had changed to the Central Line at Bank, then had alighted at Stratford as I was on an Epping train and had thought to take the train to Ilford but with several minutes for that train, I got back on the Central Line, with a Loughton destination–and this might have prompted me to get out at Leyton, the very next stop.

I had no way of knowing that something was happening that day. In my first post, I mentioned the pre-internet media ecology of the mid-1990s, with the analogue alternatives at the time, such as SchNEWS; publications such as the Big Issue were also useful for alternative voices, set apart from newspapers and the four channels of terrestrial television sources. For the immediacy of an event like the evictions on the 2nd of August, one would have to had been local to know, or be part of that particular network (I knew precisely two people with mobile phones at the time). I did not going back to take any more photographs after that day–I had another six or seven weeks to do so before I left London to start my degree. Some of the photographs from the M11 Link Road were used in some etchings in my first year of my degree; as I wrote in Retracings, these photographs were part of my formative engagement with photography, learning the craft of the darkroom, all of which would be reiterated on my degree, with a new darkroom to get used to, and the time to become more deeply immersed in photography once again.

'The Image, the Frame, and the Off-Frame'

Although film-based photography only forms part of it (perhaps an important part however), my recently completed PhD thesis 'The Image, the Frame, and the Off-frame' is now available to read on the Royal College of Art's Research Repository here:-https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/5889/

HOMES NOT ROADS

Dyers Hall Road, 26th March 1994

Revisiting my photographs of the M11 Link Road demolitions of 1993-94, I do find myself wondering why I didn't take more pictures. I had an awareness that I was documenting something and yet I wasn't at all systematic, and didn't think to keep notes about the photographs I was taking, which means that some pictures are very hard to locate, especially given the homogeneity of the terraced houses along the route. On 26th March 1994, which was a Satruday, I went out after lunch to go to the National Gallery (there was an exhibition of Claude Lorrain's work, including drawings); on my way, and got off the Central Line, to walk between Leytonstone and Leyton stations again. I took just eight photographs on colour film, many going back to houses I had photographed on black and white film taken earlier, but also took a couple on Grove Green Road, which (unless mistaken) I had not documented previously.

The first frame was of an industrial building on Grove Green Road, close to Leytonstone Station. On a map from 1950, this is marked 'printing works'. Looking back, I find I have no memory of what it was like to exit Leytonstone Station then, something I didn't think to photograph. Just past this short section of Grove Green Road outside the station, Church Lane ran underneath the railway to join up with the high street, something I don't remember; there is now a playground on the open space of the junction. Placing the first photograph from 26th March 1994, I relied on Tim Brown's photographs on Flickr: this particular building appears in a photograph (taken three days after I was there) alongside C&M Apostolides Ltd, which has a clear road number on its sign, locating the building in my photograph securely. I didn't know about Tim Brown's pictures in 2014 when I returned to revisit my images; the photograph below, taken on Grove Green Road in 2014 is very broadly in the same area, but not exactly the same view.

The next photographs are on Dyers Hall Road, where I took many of my pictures. There are three photographs of the house on the corner which I had first photographed on 31st December, then in the process of being demolished, rather more easy to replicate in 2014.

In my photograph from December 1993 of this particular house, one can see a blue plaque on the house (see Retracings), reading 'Our heritage–this house was once a home', an artwork by Paul Noble. This was evidently retrieved from the demolition: it appears in Fieldstudy No.9, and is listed there as being in the Museum of London.

The next two photographs, one appearing at the head of this post, show a house on Dyers Hall Road that I had photographed on 18th February (see Photographs Not Taken), the end surviving building on the row backing onto the Central Line before the footbridge. The contemporary view simply shows the brick wall running alongside the A12.

There's a second photograph from Grove Green Road, after Dyers Hall Road rejoins it. This is a garage, which in 2014 I couldn't really place: the buildings on this side of Grove Green Road were demolished, but enough space remained after the road was built to create a long and narrow park, fittingly called the Linear Park. In 2014 there was a wall and railings separating the park from the road, which have now been removed and a cycle lane installed alongside the pavement that runs along it. I took a few photographs at different positions: not clear which might be the right one, I chose one with trees in blossom to stand in for the unknown precise location.

The last photograph is hard to place, a detail of a doorway of a demolished house. It could conceiveably have been on the section of Grove Green Road which is now the Linear Park, but I think it's more likely to be on Colville Road, possibly close to the Langthorne Road bridge, now a foot and cycle bridge. The 2014 photograph is again that of the brick wall along the A12 (the top of the footbridge can just be seen above the wall to the right).

The eight photographs taken on 26th March 1994 were the last I took for a number of months; this was at the start of the Easter holiday, so I wasn't travelling past the route of the road on the Central Line everyday, seeing the progression of the houses being demolished; shortly after being back at college for the summer term, my camera, a Praktica BC1 jammed. I was quoted £60 to send it away to be looked at without a guarantee that it could be fixed. It had cost £50 secondhand, a Christmas present, and so I was without a camera for a number of weeks until I found a Praktica BCA body for £26 to replace the body of the BC1 (the Bank of England inflation calculator shows these prices to be just double that today).

'WELCOME TO ESSEX'

Grove Green Road, 18th March 1994

Growing up in Ilford in the 1980s and 90s, its identity as being part of London was somewhat ambivalent: ‘London’ for me was something that happened after you got on the tube (and passed the destruction along the Central Line as the houses in Leytonstone were being demolished). Ilford had been part of the new London Borough of Redbridge established in 1965, but retained an Essex postcode, and in some respects it felt as though it faced out towards Essex along Eastern Avenue (to which the M11 Link Road would join as part of the approach to the Redbridge Roundabout) as much as into London in the other direction, and the quality of being on the edge of the urban sprawl was very evident: one had to only go to a number of stations on the Newbury Park loop of the Central Line to find the point at which the march of bricks and mortar were halted by the green belt. Despite being born in central London, and spending most of my childhood and adolescence in a London Borough, it was only leaving to study for my degree when I was defined (by others) as a ‘Londoner’.

The poster in the image above from which this post takes its name was advertising the album Essex by Alison Moyet, released the Monday after the day I took these photographs (as was the Deacon Blue single), named for the singer’s native county. Of the other music postered to the corrugated iron fence, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine had been popular among a certain section of the sixth form I’d recently left; the Soul Asylum record had been out for well over a year by the point I took the photograph, but possibly was being promoted after the single Runaway Train had won ‘Best Rock Song’ in the Grammys earlier that month. This arbitrary selection of posters might in some way indicate popular music at that point early in 1994: ‘Britpop’–however defined–hadn’t quite made itself felt culturally at that point; Parklife was released at the end of April, a few weeks after these photographs were taken.

On 18th March 1994, as on previous occasions,  I walked between Leytonstone and Leyton stations to take photographs along the route of the M11 Link Road. It had been a whole month since the last photographs, and I was aware that more buildings had gone in the weeks since, but I took less pictures, just nine frames, before getting back onto the Central Line and going to visit the Sir John Soane's Museum (where I took quite a few photographs), and the British Museum to see an exhibition on Victorian illustrated books, and bumped into someone I knew from school drawing from the Parthenon sculptures. I took no photographs on Dyers Hall Road, where I taken numerous pictures a month before. Instead, the sequence begins on Grove Green Road with two very similar photographs; this section of Grove Green Road became the Linear Park. In 2014, when I revisited the locations to take photographs twenty years on, the Linear Park had railings along the road–which have subsequently been removed.

I can't quite be sure that the photographs from 2014 were really in the right place–the facing terraced houses seen at the right of the bottom pair of images does provide some orientation, but the Linear Park represents quite a long stretch of road where numerous buildings–not just houses–were demolished. The weather on 18th March 1994 was similar to that of 18th February, the previous date I took a series of photographs, heavily overcast, although less misty. In 2014, it was sunny, and photographing into the light for a number of shots, the Prakticar f1.8 lens imparted some haze to many of these images.

The picture at the head of this post is the corner where the northern end of Claremont Road met Grove Green Road and used to feature a short parade of shops. That there is a billboard on the side of the house above the remains of number 153 on the corner suggests that this house had been demolished some time previously. The end of this terrace was pulled down to number 143; two newer houses were built adjoining 143 after the completion of the road, which can be seen in the picture from 2014, below. This end of Claremont Road has completely disappeared, making for a generous width of pavement and a more gentle angle for Grove Green Road to meet the rebuilt Cathall Road bridge, to the left of the picture below.

I took one photograph on Claremont Road itself, replicating a colour photograph taken in January at the southern end of the terrace facing the railway line; the remaining stub of this end of Claremont Road provides the opportunity to take a similar photograph, but in reality this should be shot from a position hovering over the A12.

The rest of the photographs were taken on Colville Road, some made standing on the remnants of garden walls to look over the fences, possibly reinstated from when I'd taken photographs a month before and had found a number of them torn down, and took some pictures from behind the fences. In the pair of images below, the picture from 2014 is too far to the left: the line of Colville Road was moved, and as a result the corner from 1994 would be under the current wall alongside the A12. 

As with a number of my other photographs, replicating the views in 2014 (and today) results in pictures of this brick wall, with little else to enliven the compositions. Many of the mature plane trees on the far side of the railway are still recognisably the same trees however, providing one point of reference when rephotographing.

The last two photographs from the 18th March were taken at the far end of Colville Road. Here, Langthorne Road crossed over the railway. Now a foot and cycle bridge, before the building of the A12 this was a road bridge, a presumably a cut through from Grove Green Road to the other side of the railway avoiding the high road. Langthorne Road has almost disappeared, the section that joined Grove Green Road being pedestrianised; in a similar fashion, at the other end of this stretch between the two Underground stations, Church Lane used to join Grove Green Road under the railway from the other side of Leytonstone Station. Now a a dead end road on the other side of the Central Line, Church Lane's junction with Grove Green became a playground and an approach to the footbridge which took its place.